Banks are ‘commercial establishments’ — so an inmate is freed

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A bank is a “commercial establishment,” a state appeals court said Friday — which meant that a convicted check forger, despite prosecutors’ objections, doesn’t have to return to jail.

It was another case about the meaning of Proposition 47, the 2014 initiative that reduced a number of felony crimes in California to misdemeanors, shortening their sentences considerably. Among them was shoplifting, newly defined as entering an open commercial establishment with the intent to take money or property worth no more than $950.

A Riverside County man, Willie Abarca, was sentenced to three years behind bars for burglary after he tried to pass a forged $300 check at a bank in the town of Eastvale in July 2013. After Prop. 47 passed, Abarca sought to reduce his conviction to misdemeanor shoplifting, and a Superior Court judge agreed, setting him free after a year in jail.

But the district attorney’s office appealed, arguing that Prop. 47 doesn’t apply because a bank isn’t a commercial establishment. That term, prosecutors said, applies only to stores that sell products.

The Fourth District Court of Appeal said Friday that neither Prop. 47 nor any other state criminal law defines “commercial establishment.” But standard legal dictionaries define “commerce” as “the exchange of goods and services,” the court said, so the ordinary meaning of the term is “a place of business established for the purpose of exchanging goods or services” — including the financial services provided by banks.

Even if Prop. 47 is unclear, it should be interpreted broadly to achieve its purposes, Justice Marsha Slough said in the 3-0 ruling. Using the narrow definition preferred by prosecutors “will frustrate those purposes and result in the continued incarceration of persons who committed petty theft crimes,” she said.

So Abarca stays free and the law gets a bit clearer. The court’s explanation can be viewed here: www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/E063687.PDF.